What room is so large that a 350- voice choir: is so far from the podium they can't hear the conductor; is 45 feet back and 12 feet above the orchestra; can't hear the orchestra (and vice versa); sings directly in front of a pipe organ whose ranks and pipes can overpower a room with seating for 21,000?
If you said the Conference Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints then you are correct! The Conference Center is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been inside this building many times, and each time I marvel at how large it is. The main auditorium comfortably seats 21,000 spectators with enough room to house the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (350 singers), the Orchestra at Temple Square (110 musicians), the pipe organ (7,667 pipes and 125 ranks) and all of the other production personnel required for weekly radio and television broadcasts. "The Music and the Spoken Word" is the longest continuous running radio broadcast in the world. The conferences of the Church require translation into 74 languages for simultaneous broadcast. The production facilities are huge, and there is even a theatre for smaller productions with a seating capacity of 905. All seats in the audience have an unobstructed view of the pulpit. Underground is a parking garage that can hold 1,400 cars. When I spoke with the engineers, they told me that this is the third upgrade for the facility.
As Trent Walker, FOH engineer for the room and the Tabernacle Choir said: "The biggest thing about the room being this big, 21,000 seats, is in doing the choir and orchestra in here, it's really like them performing outside. There's no early reflection. The ceiling height above the choir is 75 feet–to the grid."
Curt Garner, the monitor engineer for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir says: "If they're not miked you basically don't hear them." Everything is miked, including the choir and each instrument of the orchestra. They only instrument that cuts through to the room is the piccolo, but they mike it as well. There are four EAW cross-firing small line arrays programmed into the LARES system, which provides the early reflection for the choir. That's the only way they hear themselves. There are other monitors, in the organ pipes behind the choir as well as down in front. There are monitors all over. As Trent told me they use all L-ACOUSTICS monitors. "We love 'em, the 108s and the 112s.It's the first monitor we've been able to use that the choir and orchestra love what they sound like. I mean if you stand next to 'em and you've got violin coming out it sounds just like the violin you're standing next to and that's really what you need with classical music. So we use a boatload of those things run off QSC power mainly."
I asked them how many mixes they typically had, and Curt told me that just for the basic orchestra and choir an average of about 12 mixes. Anytime they have other groups they have had as many as over 24 because of a bunch of PM's going on.
For solo instruments they use around 50 of the DPA contact mics on the strings, which sum down to 10 channels. The consoles in the big room are PM1D's. They have another PM1D in the small theatre. They also have another PM1D that goes out on the road as the FOH desk. So they tour with two PM1Ds, 96 channel systems for the road as well as in the big room where two PM1D's live all the time. Ninety percent of the shows they do, the big shows, all 96 channels are gone. The last big show used 112 inputs, so they sub-mixed off the deck.
The DPA with their summation system has made a huge difference on managing all of the strings, as well as everything they do in a broadcast. It cleans up the whole stage look. The video guys love it because now there are not mike stands in everybody's face. They can zoom in on the instrument and if you don't know what you're looking for in most cases you don't know there's a mic hanging off the strings. On the woodwinds and brass they use all ribbon mics. They're all Beyer 160s and 260s. Trent says; "We love that whole approach of using the ribbon mics. We use a lot of those. Every instrument is miked; every clarinet, every horn, all of the tubas, everything has it's own mike on it. Because of the venue size, like I say, if we don't mic it, it's not heard."
They use all DPA (3521) mics on the grand piano. All of the choir mics are Schoeps. Trent and Curt do use some of the 4006 DPA's on the orchestra and the overheads are DPA 4011's. The strings use the DPA MSB 6000 summation system.
All of the broadcast mixes are done in surround so they actually have surround mics in the audience that are set up for the broadcast mix. The facility has PM1Ds for live mixing. and there are also two Euphonix Systems 5 that are used for broadcast that are run at the same time. They just put in a 96 channel 3-way Lundahl transformer split snake system because before they were tied in with the MADI for the mic line routing. The problem they have is that the FOH and Monitor consoles were at 48k and the broadcast guys wanted to go to 96k with the Euphonix System 5's. They went to copper and did a transformer split 3-way hits which gives FOH and Monitor at 48k and the broadcast guys have their 96k, and everyone is happy.
In the long cable runs the Conference Center decided to install a lot of Millennia mic pre's on all of the choir mics and orchestra mics. The runs are long even to hit the split, with some of them over 300 feet. Many runs take 200 feet just to get to the original input cage. Trent explains: "We run multiple cages in multiple locations. That's one thing with running the 1Ds with the way that the input cages and stuff are configured. Our input cages now live right in the pre-amp room and are only running 10-feet of mic cable from the pre-out to the input cage and they're controlled. We can run 500 feet or something like that of SCSI to our console and control the input cages from there, yet they can live there so our mic cable lengths are as short as we can possibly get them."
"We just found when we put in this new split that we got a lot of gain back. We gained about 9 db on every line!" Curt exclaimed: "We had to turn everything down. All of a sudden it was just there! All the Millennias came back about 4 clicks. That has made a big difference even with the quality of the choir. They're a world-class choir. The conductors are very picky about what they want to hear."
Trent and Curt have to make sure everything they do is deliberate, and very subtle– and even then they'll have to explain what they did. The conductor's been known to walk into the room to start rehearsal and say "What did you change? Something sounds different today." Then they've gone back and realized that they did some subtle little thing that they didn't even remember, but he can hear it.
Moreover, the engineers require a certain level of expertise because when people come to hear the choir, they expect to hear the choir in the space they're used to, the Tabernacle, and not the huge room they're in now. To compensate for this there are multiple zones in the big room, which can also complicate things. Sitting at FOH you can turn the balcony and terrace off, which eliminates 10,000 people, and you wouldn't even know the sound is off. You can't tell whether they are on or off from FOH merely through listening. As a result, Curt and Trent are constantly checking things and learning from all of the performances and rehearsals.
It is a great job to have, they told me, but it requires vigilance and much dedication.
Email Paul at: poverson@fohonline.com.
